An Update

I’m a bit behind with writing things for the blog, there are about six books that I’ve read but not reviewed and also a continuation on a couple of projects that I’m working on that I was intending to write about. Part, but not all, of the reason for this is that I’m very busy with my day job. Over the last month I’ve been working much longer hours than normal, my team has doubled in size, and in the next two weeks it’s going to treble in size (that’s up from 7 to 43). This is a good from a day job perspective, but not so much for my side activities. I managed to completely miss doing TMA3 for B120. Fortunately I have had oustanding marks for TMA1 & TMA2, so provided I manage not to miss any more of the TMAs I should still manage a pass overall. The actual mark for B120 is irrelevant because it won’t count to my degree classification.

On the plus side I have written a couple of blog posts for Castlegreen Publishing about poetry. In other circumstances these would be published here, so I’ll provide links to them as mini pointers. This is an interesting project, but is also suffering from being rather busy at work. This is a Kickstarter funded anthology of Geek Poetry. So far the collecting the poetry side is going well, but my marketing skills are lacking, so the Kickstarter is likely to fail unless given a boost. That will be disappointing, but I can probably fund it myself over a longer time frame (and for less money as I won’t have to factor in the cost of rewards for the backers).

One of the book reviews that will appear soon is for Bullets & Brains: How psychology wins wars by Leo Murray. It is a fascinating book and it sort of fills in some of the gaps around the Stress of Battle analysis. One of the key things missing from the Stress of Battle is how to determine whether or not an attack will be successful (there is something in there about the overwhelming force and effects of combined arms and surprise but not enough to say, do this and it will probably work, do that and it will probably fail). I’ve mined Murray’s book for hard data (of which there is plenty, that being the objective of the book) and I’m going to glue it together with Rowland’s conclusions from Stress of Battle and a few of my own direct observations from training exercises with the TA in the early 90s. This should make for an interesting game design on how small unit combat works.

When I get a moment, which isn’t often right now, I am also working on the second draft of Perfects, which is a full novel length upgrade to the novellas published via Smashwords (Perfects & Imperfect). When it’s done it will have a print edition from Castlegreen Publishing. AT the current rate of progress that will be sometime in 2015.